"Shimmer Vision" Scopes See Better Using Heat

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist reports on a neat DARPA idea that uses the shimmer of heat haze to allow binoculars to see further. It works by exploiting the fact that some distortions from heat haze actually magnify objects behind them. The binoculars collect a series of frames when that is occurring to boost magnification by 3 times. The design goal is to be able to present one image a second, and to enable facial recognition at 90% accuracy at a distance of 1 km. The scopes could be on the battlefield inside of 3 years."

Comments

On the Battlefield

[Iamthecheese]

While military technology has been one of the primary leaders of general technology for thousands of years, it would be nice if there could be more non-military leaps.

Could this technique be used for general astronamy as well, making use of temporary increases in gravitational lensing? I know that gravitational lensing is being made use of, but I bet there are fluctuations that have, until now, been seen only as a limitation.

Re:On the Battlefield

[j. andrew rogers]

The advantage military technology has is that it is results oriented. In terms of capability they know where they are today and they can specify in considerable detail exactly where they want to be. In the case of organizations like DARPA, they give considerable latitude to the designers in how they solve these problems and the US DoD is relatively patient when it comes to ultimately getting the results they were looking for. There are qualities reflected here that are absent in many other sectors that have little to do with military research per se. In fact, these qualities are not intrinsic to military research at all, so I would say it reflects favorably on the R&D culture that the US DoD has fostered that so many interesting "blue sky" research projects get funded that more conservative private sector institutions would never consider.

There is still plenty of basic science and technology research that gets done outside of military research circles, but military research has the advantage that they are working toward a specific result or technology, even when working on "blue sky" projects. I suspect that focus on specific high-level results combined with wide latitude in design and patience in delivery breeds a very productive research environment relative to those with less critical or obvious goal structures.

1 FPS scope?

[supernova_hq]

The design goal is to be able to present one image a second, and to enable facial recognition at 90% accuracy at a distance of 1 km. The scopes could be on the battlefield inside of 3 years."

Nothin' like sniping a long-range moving target with a full second of lag!

IS already available?

[toQDuj]

I thought one of the first obvious things to implement is Image Stabilisation. I find that one of the biggest drawbacks of binoculars is that the image shakes so much at high "magnifications".

Re:That explains it...

[n3tcat]

there are many types of post-processing filters that could theoretically be run on a live feed to make it easier to pick details out of it. hell there might even be different filters that would go better for watching birds as opposed to tracking isuzu trucks out in the middle of the desert. Being able to cycle through those would be another useful feature. or being able to digitally zoom an image by studying the image via the natural shaking of your hand and using the slight shifting of the image to determine depth and then push past the focal point of the closer objects. (I feel like I totally just pulled that sentence out of my ass)